Blog
A sad start to the summer. Another BC writer passes on.
Rolf Knight, who died on June 22 at the age of 83, wrote a couple of essential books about the province and the city. I am thinking of Indians at Work, his 1978 history of Indigenous peoples' contribution to the BC economy, and Along the No. 20 Line, his entirely original 1980 memoir/history of the Vancouver waterfront. The fact that both books have been reissued over the years speaks to their continued...
I am very sorry to learn of the death of Bob McDonald on June 19 at the age of 76. Vancouver has lost one of its preeminent historians.
Bob's book on the city's early years, Making Vancouver, 1863-1913 (UBC Press, 1996), is a subtle and groundbreaking study which I return to again and again for my own work. A longtime professor of history at UBC, he was past president of the Vancouver Historical Society and a fixture at its monthly meetings, which is where I used to run into...
Speaking of Vancouver in the Fifties, as I was last time, I was struck recently by this photograph from the archives (Vancouver Public Library 81817). It shows the city's West End looking north across Burrard Inlet to the mountains. You can see that there are pretty well no tall buildings west of Burrard Street, which is the main thoroughfare running north from the bridge.
The...
One of my favourite books about Vancouver is Eva Hoffman's 1989 memoir Lost in Translation. Hoffman writes about her life growing up in Poland and emigrating to Canada with her parents and sister when she was just entering her teens at the end of the 1950s. The family settled in Vancouver and judging from her book Eva hated everything about the city, which she called "a bit of nowhere."
With the bracing certainty of adolescence, she dismissed the people as shallow and...
